Quetzalcoatl

This might shock you, but a 6-person party sneaking together will have a harder time staying undetected than a single person attempting the same. The way the stealth circles work is a reflection of that. Stealth and trap detection were combined in the Scouting mode presumably to prevent either from becoming useless. I found stealth to be rather useless in the IE games, since most dungeons were trap-filled and I would just stumble upon a trap while I was sneaking (since there way no way to detect traps while stealthing) and it would simply mean taking damage and drawing the attention of nearby enemies. I managed to stealth my way through Dyrford Crossing with a 5-person party just fine. Although I do wonder if enemy groups (like the pack of wolves) should have their stealth circles absorbed into one whole like those of the player characters. I also assume the current circles are placeholders. I would like it if the final 'stealth UI' would be the screen being darkened, and the stealth radius of the party and nearby enemies being illuminated.

I never used stealth in the IE games to scout ahead because it would just trigger traps. Combining Stealth and Detection is a pretty good solution.

Because it's not something that defines him by himself, but how others perceive him. How others perceive you is determined by how you define your character. Abstraction, like everything else in the game. If you do things a certain way, people will take notice and you will develop a certain kind of reputation. Why should there be? You're playing a game where you're making decisions. You might as well complain about not being able to prevent XP gain and item drops. And you could always choose the dialogue options with no personality modifiers. No system can track the infinite amount of subtleties of what you can do in a game, though the reputation/disposition system will arguably come closest than it has ever been done before. No one but yourself is forcing you to meta-game. You can also disable the tags that show reputation modifiers.

Am I the only one who thinks the character models look surprisingly decent, even during the zoomed in character creation? I've been following some of the streams and apart from the occasional face (death godlike with the conehead...ugh) they all look pretty nice. Way better than I expected. And armor designs are great.

Considering even games with 40 million budgets have significant UI issues, I'd say yes.

I thought the request was for a level-up screen using the portrait rather than the 3d model? Of course, that would still require additional UI work.

I can imagine the mega-dungeon granting XP for detecting and opening secret doors, finding the key to the next level, etc.

Yeah, but you also get loot from combat.

There's also Deus Ex, which might be the first cRPG to have done it.

I liked what I heard from the few voice barks in the Gamescom footage. Although there didn't seem to be any battle cries/critical hit shouts.

I was a bit disappointed to hear that pets couldn't die. Who could forget the heartbreak when entering the Fortress of Regrets and finding out your pet Lim-Lim had the life snuffed out of it? Though it should make for amusing game-over screens where a tiny pig is the last thing left standing against a giant dragon.

Yes, the Fighter's stamina regeneration is a double-edged blade and I wouldn't be surprised if that is deliberate. It forces you to put a bit more thought into when and how to employ your Fighter.

It looks fine to me, though I wouldn't be averse to bumping up the size of the characters a bit. It would also better show off all nice details on the armors. Rendering the 3d models at a slightly bigger size should be doable. I think they're already doing that with some of the creatures - the piglet is probably just a smaller version of a regular pig.

The Torment kickstarter wasn't a success because of the Numenera setting, it was a success because Planescape: Torment built up such a cult following over the years. It's no different from Wasteland 2's success (based on Fallout's legacy) and Pillars of Eternity's success (based on Baldur's Gate's legacy), with the additional advantage of being able to use the same title of 'Torment'. Whether or not an unconventional new IP can succeed on Kickstarter has yet to be proven.

Yes, Divinity: Original Sin's consisted of only the 900k they raised during their Kickstarter campaign. You know, the same Kickstarter campaign that showed off an already fully functioning game.

What's wrong with the character models? I can see disliking the faces, but the armor designs are excellent.

The short video of the beginning of the game already showed quite a variety of different critters, so that certainly bodes well.

I believe 4 million euro's translates to somewhere around 5.5 million dollars, so D:OS most certainly had a bigger budget than this game. Not to mention Kickstarter fees presumably took 400k (10%) of the original 4 million sum that Project Eternity raised. D:OS also had a longer development time and the benefit of using their own self-developed engine.

It's an objective-based xp system. Presumably there will be objectives along the lines of 'clear the basement of rats', which means it ends up functioning similar to kill xp. The obvious goal is to not punish people who want to solve a quest a different way by depriving them of experience. Being able to progress and getting items aren't reason enough?

Josh said that there is no randomness in conversations, just thresholds. With this in mind, the game is basically blocking any automatic failures, while in NWN2 you had at least a % chance to pass a check all the time. You're right in that you still could give them as an option, but then you have to consider that in NWN2/Torment a success meant some benefit to the player while PoE is designed such that the context dictates whether an action is beneficial or not, regardless of availability, so in my mind that evens out. Attribute/skill checks within dialogue were always non-randomized in PS:T and NWN2. Though you're right with your second point, I really like that PoE won't always have successful checks be automatically benificial. Another nitpick: I noticed that the Glanfathan archer kept using his/her bow even when the player and Calisca engaged him in melee. I was kinda hoping it would be like in the BG games where archer enemies switched to a melee weapon as soon as you came close. Though that brings up another question: does attacking with a ranged weapon in melee result in an attack penalty, as was the case in the IE games?

One thing that wasn't really clear for me was whether you could attempt attribute/skill checks if you didn't have enough points invested in them to succeed. Obviously this shouldn't be the case for everything (options dependent on Intellect, Perception and Lore should only be visible if you have enough points to make them appear since they denote concrete knowledge), but I don't see why you couldn't try to threaten someone or perform a physical task even if you didn't have a high enough attribute/skill to succeed. That's the way it was done in PS:T and NWN2.

Have you guys watched the IGN video? http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/07/24/pillars-of-eternity-seems-to-push-all-the-right-rpg-buttons It's the exact same part of the game as what was shown in the Giantbomb video, but it goes much more in-depth.

They looked fine, it's just that they were portraits of people that weren't all super-attractive.

I have to second what the first post said about the idle combat animations. Baldur's Gate and Torment had a 'swaying' animation between hits that made combat look very fluid. The IWD games didn't have it, and it looks like PoE won't either. It's a small thing, but it's rather jarring. Other than that, I think the game looks absolutely fantastic.

I'm not sure how that would work out. PoE will likely have a very different tone from Arcanum (which always seemed to me like a semi-satirical take on fantasy tropes).